Book launch countdown!
https://kevinbrennanbooks.wordpress.com/2019/09/11/book-launch-countdown/
— Read on kevinbrennanbooks.wordpress.com/2019/09/11/book-launch-countdown/
Every so often a light shines during these dark times we live in. Today’s bright light is courtesy of Kevin Brennon. Kevin’s latest novel, Eternity Began Tomorrow, will be available as an ebook starting September 18, 2019. I know I’ll be in line for my copy. How about you?
Coming soon: My new novel!
https://kevinbrennanbooks.wordpress.com/2019/08/28/coming-soon-my-new-novel/
— Read on kevinbrennanbooks.wordpress.com/2019/08/28/coming-soon-my-new-novel/
Coming soon! A new (and very timely) novel by Kevin Brennan!
I don’t think anything warms a writer’s heart as much as seeing her story in print. Two stories, double the warmth. You could triple or even quadruple my warmth by clicking the links provided below and ordering a copy or two which will net me a small commission.
Okay, I’m done marketing.
First up in my double-header: America’s Emerging Literary Fiction Writers!
See here, about halfway down the page, is my story title and my name:
It’s enough to make me dance in my chair.
The short story in in this volume is “Love Me Tender,” about one morning in the life of Irene Newkirk, a middle-aged woman coming to grips with her husband’s mental illness and the weight of caring for her teen-aged daughter as well as keeping up appearances.
I wrote my first draft of this story in 1992, in a fiction workshop with the late Jerome Stern at Florida State University. I remember being surprised at how well it was received and, in particular, Stern’s enthusiasm over how well I could “do cold.” Well, yeah, I can definitely “do cold” after surviving twenty-one New York winters in a two-story house with only a first-floor furnace for heat. They say heat rises, but when you’re on the second floor and it’s double-digits below zero, heat don’t rise high enough.
My second story is in this anthology, America’s Emerging Suspense Writers. The Deep South:
And again, my name and story in print. Swoon.
Even though I do not consider myself a Southerner, even though some don’t even consider Florida as part of the Deep South given its history and demographics, and even though my story takes place in upstate New York, I think it’s kind of cool being in an anthology that marks me as an emerging writer in the Deep South. Well, it’s kind of cool being in any anthology.
“Together Forever,” is a horror story, one involving a different middle-aged woman. Vicky Brooks is a real estate agent in an economically depressed part of New York. She yearns to escape the cold dreariness of her hometown and her husband. She hopes to get that chance with Miss Smith, a potential buyer for a broken-down mansion, except there is something rather odd about Miss Smith.
If either of these stories interests you, then I hope you’ll take a chance on my writing and help me fully emerge. Here again are the links:
America’s Emerging Literary Fiction Writers
America’s Emerging Suspense Writers. The Deep South
Finally, here’s a correction for those of you who still have “Hello Julia” on a loop from last Monday’s post.
It’s one thing to write a first draft of anything — short story, novel, essay — and save it to a hard drive or to iCloud or to Dropbox or to Goggle Docs or to a thumb drive. That’s one document saved somewhere. But when you have several short stories and a few drafts of each one, or perhaps a few versions of one novel, how do you organize your writing?
Currently, I’m using Dropbox which was fine until I needed to find some stories I had written years ago. I thought I had saved everything to Dropbox but … of course, I hadn’t. In searching for these old nuggets of gold on my hard drive, I found duplicates galore. The same story saved in multiple locations, but not the version I was looking for. I eventually found what I wanted but it was a nail-biting experience.
Over the years, I’ve had to adjust how I organize my files, and I know I’ve lost some in the process. Going from floppy disks (I’m that old) to 3.5 hard disks to various iterations of the Cloud. It’s appealing to use the Cloud and believe that I can access my work from any computer anywhere as long as there’s an internet connection. Of course, when you have an internet connection but the vendor’s server goes down, you’re screwed.
So my challenge is two-fold: (1) organize my writing so I can find what I want when I want it; and (2) find a reliable location to store my work.
I would really love to know what you do to store and organize your writing. I know I could learn from you. Please share in the comments section.
I’m very excited to share that I have a 50-word story up at fiftywordstories.com. If you’re not yet subscribed to this site, you’ll want to be. Here’s the link to my fifty-word story:
And to show there’s always some truth in fiction, here is a photo my husband took of the lunar eclipse on January 21, 2019.
I always think of Friday the 13th as a lucky day for me, even if the luck only extends as far as nothing bad happening on that day. This Friday the 13th started off ominously though, putting me in a funk that lasted all the way to bedtime when my luck finally changed.
As I do every morning, I was sitting with a cup of coffee in my favorite corner of our couch, a heated wrap around my neck to ease my cervical arthritis. I had been fairly upbeat the day before, since Thursday is the day before Friday which is the day before the weekend. Those two days a week–Saturday and Sunday–I practically live for. But I digress.
So I’m nestled in the corner, sipping hot coffee, poking around on my iPad as the fog from my brain slowly clears when I sniff and my sinuses contract. I quickly shoo away the first thought that comes to mind. “No, no, no! I do not want to deal with this. Not this early in the morning!” I proceeded to ignore what my nasal passages were practically screaming at me, forcing me to breath deeper as the scent overwhelmed my senses, yet I recoiled at the thought of the obvious.
Finally I took my last sip of coffee, put the mug down, the iPad away and got down on my hands and knees. Granted, I did have to put my nose practically into the thick pile of our area rug, but there was no denying it, no way to ignore it.
Cat pee. Old cat pee. I looked up at Maxine, innocently curled up on the back of the couch.
Maxine is now 14 1/2 years old and lately we’ve been having some issues around her “inappropriate elimination.” Long story short: we resolved some of this peeing in all the wrong places by doubling her dosage of Cosequin. Cats, as many of you know, are stoic creatures. They keep their pain to themselves; if they choose to let you know, it’s often in oblique ways such as peeing in all the wrong places. Our theory is that Maxine, due to her age, probably has pain or at least discomfort in her hips and the trip from the back porch or from the living room to the nearest litter box is a road too far. When we doubled her Cosequin (that is, giving her a dose with her morning meal as well as her nighttime meal), she perked up, became more alert and interactive, and ceased to pee in the living room. (The back porch is still an issue, probably because she has to use steps and a cat door to get in and out.)
But apparently that didn’t mean that we had found and cleaned up all the places she had peed on in the past couple of months. So the morning of Friday the 13th, before I went to work, I pulled the area rug from the living room, wrestling it from underneath a rather large ottoman and rolling it up so I could drag it into the garage where it can stay forever as far I’m concerned. I’m a bit of a skeptic when it comes to getting rid of the smell of cat urine; fortunately, my husband has taken on the task of soaking the porch rug with Nature’s Miracle, sucking up the residue with a shampooer, and repeating … indefinitely.
That was the start of my Friday the 13th. The rest of the day was filled with angst. I could barely motivate myself to answer emails. I didn’t go for a walk during the workday because, as per summer in Florida, it was too effing hot and humid. A twenty-minute promenade around the complex leaves me with sweat stains in all the wrong places. I almost blew off going to the gym after work. I’m glad I did go since I needed to work off some negative energy, but the road trip from my workplace to the gym is like the highway from Hell.
Eventually I made it home, disgruntled and peevish (my husband’s word). He had spent the day cleaning the porch rug. We had dinner, drank wine and watched an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. We got ready for bed. What happened next returned the luck to Friday the 13th.
I flipped open my iPad, something I don’t often do right before bedtime and I can’t say why I did it this night. But I did. On the screen, a series of email notifications bubbled up. One was from Z Publishing. The subject line was “Your Submission Decision.” The first sentence of the email read “We at Z Publishing House would like to congratulate you for having your writing accepted into our upcoming Florida’s Emerging Writers publication!”
It’s all a blur after that. I think I started shouting. My husband ran into my room. I read him the email. We’ve been celebrating every since.
Way back in April, I received an email from one of the staff at Z Publishing, inviting me to submit some of my writing for their upcoming series of America’s Emerging Writers. She had visited my blog and thought I might be interested. Well, that was an understatement. I did a quick search on Z Publishing, found a forum on Reddit that pretty much verified the entity as legit so I went to work. I managed to pull together five short short stories–the word count is 1250–and sent them in. I had only a couple of days to meet the early bird deadline, and my husband remembers very well how I closed myself up in my room tweaking those short stories to fit Z’s requirements … and still make sense.
Ever since I have been waiting. Now I know that three months is not a long time to wait to hear from a publisher, but I don’t do this very often. Well, actually, I don’t do this. I can count on one hand the number of submissions I’ve made in the last several years.
The publication date is September 6, with preorders available starting August 6. At that time, I’ll join their affiliates program and will be able to provide you all with a link to Z Publishing so you can purchase Florida’s Emerging Writers or any book that strikes your fancy. I will get a commission for any sales that come through that link. That’s icing.
The cake is the publication of one of my stories in a printed book.
The luck of Friday the 13th has been redeemed.
One last thing: I really owe it to ALL of you for being part of my life, for encouraging me, following my blog, reading and sharing my stories and WIPs. I know this is a very small success, and I won’t stop here.
THANK YOU for always being here for me. MWAH!
I’m reblogging this essay from The Disappointed Housewife not only because I want to promote The Disappointed Housewife, but also because this essay by Krista McCarthy is spot-on when it comes to social media. I am not quitting social media, but McCarthy’s essay captures the tension I have with social media … especially Facebook. Sorry, Zuckerberg, but connecting with people through Facebook has not always been a happy, positive, three-dimensional experience. Even with family, sometimes it’s painfully one-dimensional. I’m not quitting Facebook. I’m in too deep. But I’m going to Google Krista McCarthy.
So I’m off social media. I did it. I went in too deep, and now I’m just out. Because it flattened me.
It started with Facebook. It’s like only Zuckerberg really understood what was going to be happening, and had to happen, and that is that people would start connecting. But he might not have thought through the dynamics of that kind of connecting, which allows the subject – the “person” depicted on the Facebook page – to show herself to the world in any way she likes.
I didn’t need to connect to “friends and family” because I was already close enough to them and we all talked. On the phone. Instead I wanted to connect with other people. People I didn’t know yet and who didn’t know me. I was going to be (I thought) a monologist, though I think monology was already getting a little bit…
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Not to toot my own horn, but here I am tooting! I am honored to be included in this new online literary journal, The Disappointed Housewife. Many thanks to Kevin Brennan for kick-starting my own literary career by publishing my different kind of fairy tale. I hope you enjoy it!
Once upon a time, a child was born with long, silky blond hair. In fact, she came out of the womb, not head first, but hair first. The doctors and nurses and her parents were both fascinated and repulsed by the sight of the bloody blond hair that lay pooled on the hospital bed. A nurse came toward the infant with scissors but the mother stopped her. “No,” she said. “Let the hair stay. I will wash it myself.” She looked up at her husband whose face was a pale shade of gray. “We will call her Rapunzel,” she said and her husband dutifully nodded.
They had all expected Rapunzel’s hair to fall out and then regrow slowly, normally. But the hair stayed and it continued to grow until, by the time Rapunzel was walking, her hair followed behind her like a princess’s wedding train. And by then the whole…
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Nothing. Yes, dear Reader, I got almost nothing for this post today. I have been fairly productive of late, but not with writing or blogging. Again, it’s the knitting.
A friend noted that the buttons on the baby sweater I knitted for a baby-to-be might not be appropriate for a baby.
Yes, they are cute cat heads but the ears are rather pointy, not too sharp against my rough old skin, but I don’t want to the buttons to be the cause of baby’s first injury. So I swap them out for these.
And, to be honest, I think these buttons are better suited. They are pretty without drawing the eye entirely away from the sweater pattern.
I hope to present the parents-to-be with the sweater and hat tonight. I’m sure they will be pleased that at least the outfit can be machine washed and dried, and yet it is wool. Merino wool, in fact, which is very soft.
Well, that’s it for now. I’m thinking (again) of changing my blogging schedule. If I aim for Fridays, then I can have all week to write and revise my posts instead of doing them half-off as I am now. We’ll see.
Oh, and what about the classes I’m taking? Well, the Modern Poetry class is a no-go for me. It’s too fragmented: too many links to follow, an audio here, a video there. Each week brings an email (or two) with several embedded links. In contrast, a class I started a long while ago (on a lark), through the same platform (Coursera) has a very simple syllabus, with all content accessible through my iPad app. The course is historical fiction and very interesting so far. I can (and have) happily watched a video lecture while knitting. I’ll say more about that class in a later post. I’m still looking forward (with eagerness and dread) to the Fiction Workshop that will be offered free through the International Writing Program. That will start on Thursday, September 24. And, no doubt, you’ll hear all about that as well.
Until then a little eye candy for all you cat lovers: my green-eyed boy Junior. Why buy a fancy cat bed when an old basket and a couple of magazines make him happy?
Marie at 1 Write Way 